“Perhaps now, as in Orwell’s time, censorship is not a problem of compliance—people are not ordered, or not as a rule ordered, to comply. The ogre of Orwell’s age was complacency; alas, the ogre of our age is more formidable: complicity.”

As someone who has been more or less fixated on death since I was a child, I am a fan of children’s books about death, and as a parent, have mourned the fact that there is a dearth of them—or at least a dearth of ones I really like.

Kristen Iskandrian’s first novel, Motherest, is told in first-person by 18-year-old Agnes, who lives in “the middle of a New Jersey nowhere” and has just begun college in “the middle of a New England nowhere” in 1993.

I first saw Barbara Browning when she was naked, one hand extended to open a shower curtain, in our shared dorm bathroom, when we were both in our late teens. Barbara wore her hair short then, and her compact little body was so unapologetically whole, not a series of parts in the way I considered my own body to be.

In Visceral Poetics, poet Eleni Stecopolous' recent book on, among other things, struggling with chronic pain while trying to write a dissertation about Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopolous writes about her frustration with being undiagnosable.